by Anita Desai
He could have gone on speculating and arriving at more and more bizarre and unsavoury explanations, but she paused, there was a sudden silence in which she cleared her throat loudly, clutching her neck as she did so. With a look of her eyes, she summoned some younger women out of the audience to her side. An earnest dialogue took place between them. After much scuffling and shifting and whispering, the harmonium player rose and left the divan and his place was taken by the oldest and plainest of her women friends – a thin, stiff woman clothed in brown with her veil tightly drawn across her forehead and tucked behind her ears to make her look as if she had no hair at all. The other friends, younger and prettier and more attractively clothed, fell back with obvious disappointment, giggling to cover up their discomfiture. It was the elderly stick-insect woman who was chosen to sing. It was obvious to Deven why, and he twisted his lips in scorn at the poetess’s vanity. Turning to the audience again and pointing at her throat – which was long and slim and fair, yes – she explained, ‘You must forgive me – my throat – it gives me trouble. I need your help – your forgiveness.’ She bowed her head. Had she been an actress once? A dancer? Where – in a brothel? She knew all the appropriate tricks. Now she began to sing in a lower key, in a sad, wilted voice, as one on whom the rain did not fall, whose lover did not come. After each phrase, she fell silent and sat brooding, picking at the rug with red-nailed fingers while her friend took up the phrase and repeated and embellished it in tragic tones. Her voice was as plain as her appearance – Imtiaz Begum could not have chosen a more apt foil. Oh she was cunning, cunning, Deven had to admit.
Suddenly Nur heaved himself out of his chair and stood tottering on the two pillars of his legs, looking as if he were about to fall. Deven scrambled to his feet to support him from behind. He was aware of the women on the divan glaring in their direction, the audience shifting and shuffling and questioning the interruption, but he ignored them and stepped over their feet and knees and shoulders to help the poet stumble away into the veranda.
‘It is enough,’ groaned Nur. ‘I must lie down. Show me my bed.’
Deven looked around for help, knowing perfectly well he would not be able to haul him up the stairs to the top floor by himself. Seeing them stagger down the veranda with their arms around each other, some of the young men sitting at the back of the audience detached themselves from the carpets and came to their aid.
‘What is it, Nur Sahib, aren’t you enjoying the Begum’s birthday celebrations?’ asked a young man with a nasal voice like the singer’s. He even had her nervous, intense face. She must have planted her relations in the audience, to lead the applause. Didn’t Deven know that for a common trick? He gave him a fierce look and did not surrender Nur’s arm.
But Nur groaned, ‘I am tired – I want – I want –’ and stood looking around helplessly. To Deven’s relief, the dirty urchin who generally served him put down a trayful of clay cups of tea that he was passing around and came to help. Together, they shoved the old man, creaking and complaining, all the way up the stairs to the room on the terrace. It was a long haul, painful and often verging on the impossible, but as the two voices rose and joined each other in a frenzied crescendo, the impulse to escape grew so strong that it helped them to achieve that impossible level. Here, although the late night show of the nearby cinema house was in full swing, its songs and dialogues and pistol shots magnified and relayed across rooftops and streets and bazaars, it seemed quieter simply because it was deserted, there was no one else there. The curtains and mats were drawn against the lurid electric lighting and kept the room as dark as a lair.
They lowered Nur on to his bed and he collapsed upon it as a dead weight. The boy disappeared into a corner and then reappeared with Nur’s usual tumbler filled to the brim. He did not ask if Deven wanted one too and Nur did not appear to notice the lapse. Even hospitality was driven out of his head by the performance downstairs.
Deven sat on the cane stool as he had on his first visit, keeping his head lowered so as not to watch while the poet drank and drank. Then, wiping his mouth and throwing his head back into the high pillow, Nur sighed, ‘Birthdays. I thought we had done with celebrating them, with the setting up of gravestones along the path of life. Who wants to read the dates engraved upon them? But the vanity of women – oh, the vanity! No chance to gather garlands, gifts, applause, attention can be passed by, you see. Not even the occasion of the setting up of another gravestone.’ He began to laugh sadly and Deven cleared his throat, not knowing if it was proper to add his own banal comments on the matter. He had himself long ago stopped counting the years, and when asked his age had to stop and calculate: was it thirty-five or thirty-six?
‘Mind you,’ said Nur, surprising Deven by fixing an eye on him and speaking much more crisply of a sudden, ‘she was not always like this, you know. When she first came to my house, she was happy just to sit in a corner, and listen. She told me she wrote verse – but she would not even show it to me. She said she only wanted to listen – and learn from me. She sent my secretary away. I had a secretary then but she said she wanted to work for me so she sent him away.’ He closed his eyes and laughed silently, his lips peeling back from his stained gums and rotten teeth, like a mask of decay. ‘You see, they are like that in the beginning, when you are alone together. But then the others came – to listen to me. They only wanted to hear my poetry. They paid her no attention. And she was not used to that. So that is how it began …’ He waved his hand in the direction of the performance down in the courtyard, now loud with the accompaniment of drums and harmonium, reaching for a high-pitched climax in the night. ‘That is what she really wanted, you see. This house – my house – was the right setting for it. The right setting – unlike her own house which was a house for dancers, you see – although she was quite famous, you know, for her singing. She was one of the top – the top – when I saw her –’ he mumbled, still with his eyes closed. ‘But she was not content with that, she wanted my house, my audience, my friends. She raided my house, stole my jewels – those are what she wears now as she sits before an audience, showing them off as her own. They are not her own, they are mine! And she sent my secretary away too.’ He gave a cry, opened his eyes very wide and held out his tumbler to be refilled. Holding it close to his chin, he began to curse the woman in the most filthy terms he could assemble with his slurred speech and sodden memory. The dark room reeked – of filthy abuse, rotten gums, raw liquor, too many years and too much impotent rage.
Deven disliked this as much as he had earlier disliked the woman and her singing. It was not a fit subject and not proper language for a poet, nor worthy of the poet. Trying to interrupt, he said desperately, ‘Murad-bhai told me you wished to dictate something to me, sir, that you had something you wished me to take down –’
‘What?’ roared Nur. ‘Another looter? raider? thief? Poor as I am, must I have the rags torn off my back by these vultures who can’t wait till I die? Allah – oh Allah,’ he began to weep, flinging himself about till the servant boy came back with an angry look and took his glass from him to refill. Then he lay against his pillows, quietly holding it under his chin, and glanced slyly at Deven to see what effect his outbreak had had on him. ‘What have I to give you, my friend? Nothing, I tell you, nothing. I am a beggar myself now, all my jewels stolen away.’ He gave a sudden howl, animal and ululating, making Deven freeze.
‘You sent me a postcard, calling me,’ Deven reminded him reproachfully.
The newly vehement tone of his voice made the poet break off his lament and turn it somehow into a laugh. ‘Oh yes, yes – perhaps. That was on the day I wrote a new poem. No, not new, that is not true – it was one I wrote long ago, in college, the day my best friend died, and I suddenly remembered the first four lines of it; then it all came back to me –’ he gestured with the palm of his hand, drawing it across his eyes as if wiping a pane of glass – ‘it all came back, you know – his fever, how he raved, how he died, while outside a gardener was wate
ring the rosebed with a hose pipe and a mynah bird was singing in the spray from it, but he couldn’t hear and I was telling him to listen – and I wanted someone to write it down for me while I tried to remember it all.’
Deven found himself on his knees beside the bed. He had slipped off his stool and was kneeling beside the poet. ‘I will write it now,’ he urged, ‘if you will recite it, sir.’
Nur reflected on that for a long time, his opaque eyes turned inwards as he sipped his drink. Then his eyes rolled sideways and one of them seemed to droop out of its red socket towards Deven’s tilted, waiting face. ‘I have many poems,’ he muttered, with a certain slyness, ‘many I could tell you – never written down, or written and lost. But I am too old to go hunting them down, too broken and crushed, you see, to find all that is there – somewhere here –’ he slapped the side of his head, making it wag. ‘But if the right person – the right man – came, not Imtiaz-bibi, I won’t tell her, I won’t let her have them – I need someone else – and if I could find someone else to sit beside me and listen, I’d have much to tell, yes,’ he began to laugh softly into Deven’s face. ‘Much, much to tell,’ he chuckled.
Deven was still on his knees, breathing painfully, trying to think what proposal he could make, how he could draw out of Nur the maximum amount, when there was a noise of slapping slippers on the tiled floor of the veranda, of papery satin slashing against swift legs, and in marched Imtiaz Begum, her face ravaged, lipstick and kohl smeared from the corners of her eyes to the corners of her mouth, her hair escaping in black bunches from under the veil on to her shoulders, and her long fingers clutching at her fluttering, metallic garments as if to rip them. Exhaustion and rage were written in her every gesture and expression.
Instantly Nur began to cringe, his lips to pout, his glass to tilt and spill across Deven’s hands, folded in supplication at the edge of the bed. Deven, remaining paralysed in that position, entered that state in which he could not credit his own eyes and ears, doubted every sound and image as it attacked him, and never could say later what he had seen or heard.
‘So, this is where you have come to hide,’ she began in her hoarse, exhausted voice. ‘A tortoise that sticks its head in the mud at the bottom of the pond,’ she taunted him. ‘You couldn’t face an audience that was not willing to listen to you. You couldn’t accept the evidence of my success. You could not bear the sight of someone else regaling a large audience with poetry – the same poetry you used to mouth –’
‘Mouth? I mouthed it?’ moaned Nur, as hoarse as her.
‘Yes, and see what it has earned me tonight,’ she cried, letting fall the fold of her garment that she had been clutching so that rupee notes showered from it to the floor. Neither Nur nor Deven turned their heads a fraction to look at the money. Averting their eyes from it as if from something monstrously embarrassing, they sat frozen while she screamed, ‘Ali! Ali! Come and pick this up and count it. Put it in a bag and give it to your master.’
‘No, Ali, don’t touch it!’ cried Nur, turning his face aside and shutting his eyes.
‘Then how will you buy your drink?’ she challenged him. ‘How will you pay for all those bottles Ali gets you from the corner shop? You know that is how you have ruined your voice, your song. That is why you cannot abide my voice, cannot abide to hear me sing and so you insult me by getting up and leaving my performance. You insult me!’
Her voice rose to such a pitch that it was about to shatter, and Deven lifted his hands to his ears before the walls cracked and the roof fell upon them, but all that happened was that the screen at the door was lifted aside and another woman entered the room. Deven looked to see if rescue was at hand, and saw an old creature wrapped in a brown cloak, her white hair combed about the sides of her face. The face was commanding, so straight in its lines, so military in its firmness. ‘Run away from here, bitch,’ she said in a level voice, and in a corner Ali was heard to snigger – ‘and leave the old man alone. What more do you want from him? You have taken his name and his reputation and today even his admirers. Be satisfied. Leave him and go down, go dance before the public since that is your manner of earning a living –’
The younger woman who had appeared stricken by apoplexy, leapt at her with a screech. Nur’s bed lay between the two, she would have to leap over him and stamp him under her feet to get at her enemy. Deven would have to protect him. He scrambled to his feet, and turned and fled.
‘I had to catch the bus,’ he explained. ‘The last bus to Mirpore. I couldn’t spend another night in Delhi without informing Sarla. She gets very worried and –’
‘Oh, Deven, fool, you thought about your bus at that moment? Instead of staying to see the two women tear each other’s eyes out over the great poet’s body, as anyone else would have done his best to stay and witness, you ran to catch your bus?’ Murad lay back in his chair, gasping with horror and laughter.
‘I can’t do this night after night,’ Deven complained in an aggrieved tone. ‘I have my job to think of, and my wife and son. I can’t let this family’s dramas and performances take over my whole life.’
‘Even if it is the family of the poet Nur?’ Murad asked in a disbelieving tone. ‘I must say, I had expected something different from you, my friend. I thought with your lifelong admiration for his work, your book about him, you were sensitive to his poetry, his quality –’
‘I am, I am,’ protested Deven. ‘Of course I am, Murad. Everything I have written, everything I have thought is influenced by Nur, by Nur’s poetry. It is only his genius, my respect for his genius that made me come to Delhi and agree to the interview –’
‘Look here, you don’t have to agree to any interview,’ Murad broke in roughly. ‘It is Nur Sahib who has to agree to the interview –’
‘Murad-bhai,’ Deven interrupted eagerly, ‘what I am trying to say is that it will be much more than a magazine interview. He is prepared to give me much more than that. I don’t know how it is – whether he has seen in me a disciple, a scholar, a student, or what – or if he is so old now and finds the end close – but he has told me he wants me to do much more than interview him. He is willing to recite his poetry to me, new verse and old verse that he has never written down, it is all still in his head and will be lost if it isn’t written – he wants me to take it down. I think I can do even more if I can draw it out of him, if I have time, he may even dictate his memoirs to me …’ his voice shook, faded away, and a look crossed his face that made Murad stare.
‘You think so?’ he queried, seemingly impressed at last. ‘That would be a great event, Deven, a great event in the world of Urdu poetry. Perhaps I can give up a whole number to it – a whole number dedicated to Nur Sahib’s work –’
‘Murad, it will be more than just a magazine number – it may be a book,’ Deven glowed. ‘If only we have the time – he and I – to meet and put it all down on paper –’ now he broke off and frowned, worriedly. ‘But how? That is the problem. How can I take time off from my work in the college? How am I to take it all down –’
‘A tape recording,’ Murad said, promptly and emphatically. ‘That is the answer: a tape recording.’
Deven gave him a disgusted look. ‘What are you talking about?’ he snapped. ‘You think this is going to be some song for the cinema, or radio, perhaps? Hunh – tape recording! You Delhi-wallahs and your big ideas.’
‘You village pumpkin,’ Murad exclaimed. ‘You are still stuck in the age of the printed page, hypnotized by Gutenberg, I suppose. Don’t you know it is over? Don’t you know the written line is nearly extinct? If you can’t add sound and sight, it won’t do with the public. The public wants to see and hear, not put spectacles on its nose and learn the alphabet. These days everything is put down on film or tape. Haven’t you seen, or heard, you donkey?’
‘Look, don’t use all those animal names,’ Deven said sharply, growing hot about the ears.
‘All right, all right, I will call you by flowers’ names if you like – only lis
ten. Get hold of a tape recorder. Then go and sit beside his bed. Give him a drink – buy him a bottle – and ask him to start reciting. Everyone knows he needs to be oiled, so do the oiling and he will recite. Switch on the tape recorder, sit back and listen. That is all. You will have it all on tape, for the whole Urdu-speaking world to listen to, not only Nur’s words but Nur’s own voice!’ His voice rose in triumph at this serendipitous idea and he practically laughed in self-congratulation. ‘Then you can take home the tapes and take dictation from them. You can do that at home. See, it will solve all your petty family-man problems: get Nur’s memoirs on tape, carry them home and transcribe them at your leisure. So you have a book as well at the end of it. My Days with Nur Shahjehanabadi – how do you like the title? Deven-bhai, when you have a head like a pumpkin and live in a field, then it is better to come to someone like me for ideas, no? Would such an idea have entered your head, there amongst the grains and grasses of your village? No, you have to come to me for it. At least pay me the compliment of looking intelligent, looking as if you understood and felt grateful –’
‘Murad-bhai,’ Deven confessed at last, ‘it is – it is a brilliant idea. Brilliant. But a tape recording, a tape recorder – how? From where will I get such things? I don’t have one. I have never used one. I have not even managed to buy a radio yet for my family and you are telling me to get a tape recorder and tapes.’
Murad slammed the flat of his hand down on the table top and got up, pushing away his chair. ‘Try to use your own head sometimes – give it a little exercise – it will get stuck with rust otherwise. Is it so difficult to get a tape recorder? To find someone to use it? To get hold of a few blank tapes? This is the age of electronics, haven’t you heard? Or hasn’t the news travelled to Mirpore yet? Go and get one,’ he roared suddenly, ‘and then come and ask me what to do next.’